


Words

by White_Rabbits_Clock



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: B/c fuck it right?, M/M, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 11:18:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8748454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/White_Rabbits_Clock/pseuds/White_Rabbits_Clock
Summary: Sherlock always did like words, even if he had a hard time using them.





	

Sherlock loves words. And he loves to use the most complicated words. Not often, mind you, but maybe once or twice per word, and only when you can hear it, as if he’s running a practice test to make sure he will do it right when it matters. But you never heard Sherlock say these words out loud.

You don’t do it either, but in the safety of your own head, they come back to you. You feel the opia that sometimes accompanies his pale silver gaze as it bore into you on those few occasions that Sherlock seemed to truly see you, or at least some part of you.

You remember months ago, when the two of you had been high and dry as far as cases went for eighty nine days. You remember feeling lachesismic, hoping something- anything- would go wrong for Sherlock to go and figure out. Anything to lift the haze of fighting and snapping and gunshots in the middle of the night. Lately, you’d begun to find him sitting in his chair, hands clenched like vices. Or shackles. 

You knew he was resisting the impulse to do something dangerous. Something that would kill him. Something he’d fought too hard to break free of. You remember going to your room after a particularly vicious jab about your shoulder injury and pulling out the shopping list from your back pocket.

You opened up your computer and, assured that no one is watching you, looked up a quadratic formula in which x is the exponent, entered into the computer and wrote down each input below each letter of the shopping list. You did this a few more times before double and triple checking your work to make sure it’s perfect, then change some of the numbers on purpose. “Mistakes” that Sherlock had to work around. 

You walked downstairs, dropped the final piece of paper on the table, and walked off.

“What is this?”

“Figure it out,” you said, and stormed back upstairs. You needed a shower. 

When you got out, Sherlock was still gone. Good riddance. Hopefully, this will satisfy him for long enough to get a good night’s sleep. You had enjoyed the hour or so you had left. Then you heard the yelling, the shuffling, the sounds of flesh being wrent, the screams of people dying. Before you knew it, the sounds of war had risen outside you window just as the front door slams shut. 

Sherlock, groceries still in hand, had pushed Mrs. Hudson in ahead of him. 

“We have to go. Get your shit,” Sherlock panted as he left the groceries in the walkway and shoved a chair up underneath the door handle. Mrs Hudson wastes no time either, shuffling around in the hall closet until she found the cotton grocery bag she’d given Sherlock more than a year ago and began shoving all the nonperishables they had into it and folding it down tight, shoving it into the top of the big canvas army bag you came downstairs with. 

“What’s going on?” he’d asked.

“The undead,” he said as he pulled the zip up on the clothes he’d changed into.  Then you’d run. At that point, when the three up the stairs to the rooftop, where you shifted into his minotauran form and jumped away, Sherlock following on his heavy black wings, you felt the nodus tollens winding through your soul. 

You felt it then, and you feel it down, along with a sense of enoument as you looked at the jagged cut running through his cheekbone, the wasted pallor that his flesh had adopted. The snarl of a man turned savage. 

You don’t breathe when you fire the gun, knocking the last of your heart out as it rips through his proud forehead. He crumples, just another corpse, now. You look around, and assured of your safety, pulls out the matchbox you keep close to you, light one, and drop it on his body, lighting him up. 

You turn away, and begin to move. It’s better this way, you tell yourself as you remember the last you saw Mrs. Hudson, how she had cut her own throat and jumped off a cliff. All she’d written was that they’d make it farther without her. 

You’d felt something profoundly painful then, and something empty now, and you wish… god you would give anything to feel less (liberosis, he’d said). You would give anything to have them back. You know that if you had been the one to jump, Mrs. Hudson would have stayed. Mrs. Hudson could have kept him in the building. Mrs. Hudson would never have taken her eye off of him. Not even for a moment. 

You arrives back at the cabin and quickly grabs his stuff, parsing out what he should definitely take between their two packs and hiding the rest. It’s better this way, you tell yourself as you take to running again, powerful muscle and ragged fur rippling as you make tracks. You’ve got to get away before the rest follow the scent of burning. 

He would have done it himself if he had been in his own mind. He would have hated this- this mindless wobbling about in a decaying bag of flesh. He would have hated it because, no matter how hard he pushes, he would never have been able to think again. You know this. You say it over and over- there was nothing to be done but shoot.

But, in your heart, you know you are a murderer of those you swore you’d never seriously hurt. Not after you’d put the pieces together about his scars and their age after his fall. So you go on, promising to do what Sherlock wanted- fix this. Fix this entire fucking mess. Even if it kills you.

Then, and only then, are you going to join him.

**Author's Note:**

> opia- the vulnerable and penetrating feeling of looking into someone else's eyes.  
> lachesismic- the wish that something bad will happen  
> nodus tollens- the sense that you no longer understand the plot of your life  
> enoument- the bittersweet feeling of having arrived in the future, seen how things turn, and being unable to tell your past self  
> liberosis- the wish to feel less.


End file.
